


Taking the Red Eye to Nowhere

by further



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-05
Updated: 2013-04-05
Packaged: 2017-12-07 13:41:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/749155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/further/pseuds/further
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written in 2009.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Taking the Red Eye to Nowhere

In a wonderful interview on writing comic slash, Citizens Against Bad Slash asked Jane St Clair about common mistakes she saw novice writers make in the Marvel fandom.

"Writing Gambit. I'd like to make him off-limits to all new comic slash writers. The angst potential's just too high, and there are *far* too many fanon conventions about him. Which means that unless the author's got a serious comics collection to rely on, and refers to it pretty frequently, he turns into Stock Slash Bottom Boy, complete with tears, self-hatred, effeminacy, infantalization, and necessary daddy-figure." 

I was feeling that shit when I read it; I was in the midst of trying to relocate the Logan/Remy Slash Archive which was slated to go off-line when Yahoo discontinued its GeoCities service. Naturally, this meant I was getting a big damn daily dose of Gambit slashery. And although the archive showcased a truly comprehensive collection of classic Remy/Logan slash, by virtue of its sheer size, it also offered an equally considerable number of stories where Remy was so badly written he was barely recognizable.

OOC Remy LeBeau fics are as fascinating to me as they are frustrating. Not only is Remy written out of character with astonishing frequency, but the ways in which he is written out of character are so bizarrely consistent from writer to writer. Oh, the many nights I've lain awake asking myself, "How is that so many authors fuck Gambit up and in ways that are so alike?" It's as if there’s canonical Remy, there’s fanonical Remy (who is pretty much canonical Remy but gets laid) and then there’s this whole other bizarro phantom unRemy who's all The Story of O meets Marysue and who only exists in fanfic. "Where did this third and crazy-ass Remy come from?" I've wondered in anguish. "And why is he so often written about when he sucks so much?"

 

According to Marvel, canonical Remy is this guy: http://marvel.com/universe/Gambit

Smart, smooth, eccentric and exotic, criminal and heroic, an unlucky and unapologetic optimist; in short? A bad-ass GQ mother fucker, y'all..

Who the fuck wouldn't porn him?

But in slash, Gambit's only that guy every now and then. Most of the time? He's an emasculated train-wreck who can't control his powers and rarely does any superhero type stuff because he's too busy being victimized or punishing himself. Torture, rape, child sex slavery, cutting and alcoholism are only a few of the overwrought constants in these tawdry tales of whump. Sinister, Rogue, Creed and sometimes even Wolverine serve as the unidimensional sadist characters out to abduct, fuck or kill OOC Remy- if not all three. Any romance, love or non-violent sex springs straight from pity rather than from eros, joy or an intense mutual connection between equals. 

 

I know. It sounds totally freaking hot. 

 

St Clair mentions the importance of having a good grasp of canon and after puzzling about the origins of OOC Remy, I do believe the most likely explanation is that he is the unfortunate result of slash based on other people's slash rather than based on the comics themselves. 

As a writer, as a journalist, the closer I can get to what or who I'm writing about, the better the resulting work. The farther away I am forced to go for information, the greater the chance of distortion. When it comes to basing a fan fic on a fan fic, it's like the difference between a photo and an old school Xerox of a photo. I end up with a copy of a copy and the clarity suffers.

Think about it: if you ain't writing for money, then you better be writing for love. Otherwise why bother? Writing is work. Takes up time. I'm not saying it's thankless tedium, but even if the act of writing, I dunno, makes you cream yourself, it's still a god damn endeavor that demands some sort of compelling va-va-va-voooom to set things in motion. 

So how is it possible to be excited enough about something that you want to write fiction about it and yet to not be interested enough in it to want to see it for yourself? How can anybody become a fan of something without ever having encountered it? 

Anytime I've checked out a new fandom via the fiction, if I liked what I found, I'm going to like it enough to go check out the original that inspired it. When shit excites me, I become nosy about it, wanna explore and discover things about it. It's part of what's fun about liking shit. My brain lights up with questions.

Am I a fucking alien? Is that why my brain works this way?

 

Suffice to say that people basing their slash solely or mainly on other people's slash makes no sense and the resulting work suffers. And I am pretty sure it's how we ended up with so much Gambit that doesn't ring true. I can only add to St Clair's observation that, unfortunately, it's not just new writers who do this. Even some of the most seasoned and prolific authors who slash Remy fuck him up in the same vein as authors who are newly wading in to Marvel 'verse. It goes waaaaay past being a rookie mistake. At this point, it's a fanonical trope; the majority of fanfic featuring Gambit is OOC.


End file.
